Wood chippers have been around in various physical formats for decades. Generally, these devices have attached winches to help drag the downed trees, brush or foliage to the area in front of the chipper, where they can be manually uncoupled and fed into the chipper for grinding. The problem with the prior art devices is that they utilize drum reel winches which are fixed in their location and they are limited in the speed of takeup, their payout (length of cable), their ability to take in knotted cable, and their angle of pull. This severely impacts the amount of time conventional drum reel winches take to complete a job as well as their capability for handling different cutting, retrieval and grinding operations.
Henceforth, an improved winching system that may be used to quickly retrieve any length of line that was payed out, can be adapted for various retrieval operations and that can feed retrieved foliage directly into the grinder, would fulfill a long felt need in the wood chipping industry. This new invention utilizes and combines known and new technologies in a unique and novel configuration to overcome the aforementioned problems and accomplish this.